


let the echo shake it all apart

by sequence_fairy



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-04
Updated: 2015-03-04
Packaged: 2018-03-16 06:31:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3477956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sequence_fairy/pseuds/sequence_fairy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was too late when he realized, too late to do anything but try to aim her at something that wasn’t the entirety of existence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	let the echo shake it all apart

**Author's Note:**

> This is super out of my usual writing comfort zone. Kate ([thedoctordanceswithrose](http://thedoctordanceswithrose.tumblr.com/)) held my hand, and beta’d and generally made me feel like I could do this. Thanks love. 
> 
> This was born from my desire to read something about Rose going darkside after swallowing the heart of the TARDIS. Something I’ve not been able to find elsewhere. 
> 
> Title comes from ‘There’s No Secrets This Year’ by the Silversun Pickups

_Remember when I saw you in orbit_  
_Remember when I pulled you back in_  
_Remember looking on blinking into the dawn_  
_Thinking how this will never end_   - Surrounded (Or Spiraling) - Silversun Pickups

~*~*~*~*~

She’s golden, this goddess, but she’s fire, and not the righteous kind. In front of her, timelines twist and turn and shatter; planets and galaxies dissolving and reforming as she desires. The woman she was, the conduit for this unimaginable energy, this uncontainable power, is long gone; burned out to nothing as the fire of time and possibility consumed her from within. No benevolence in her; the universe bends to her will and she rules with the certainty of the impossibly unopposed.

She holds court on one of the moons of Poosh, the spires of her castle reaching impossibly high into the thin atmosphere. The woman who was Rose Tyler and is now Time made flesh and bone lounges in her throne. She’s kept the same form, and for the most part she still looks like Rose: Tousled blonde hair, tight jeans, and a mouth made for tongue-touched smiles; but the golden light that swims in her irises speaks of eternity and the vortex, and flashes molten when she’s perturbed.

Power corrupts, he knows, but he thought he’d been quick enough to pull it out and save Rose from this. He should have known; should have recognized the signs. Should have put it all together; the way the TARDIS seemed to bend to her whims, the way she hummed and crackled and sparked in the back of his mind. It was too late when he realised, too late to do anything but try to aim her at something that wasn’t the entirety of existence.

The man who was the Doctor (because how can he still be the Doctor when he couldn’t save her?) cannibalizes his TARDIS into whatever she needs, because he’s seen her take entire civilisations and turn them into dust with a wave of her hand. If he can help by turning her head with pretty things, and getting word out to the innocents in the path of her wrath, he does it. It’s all he can do, and even then it’s not enough, because he knows she sees right through him.

A jagged burst of power crackles through the hall and he struggles to keep his footing as the timelines constrict. Judgement has been handed down, and he watches as some of the assembled fade away, lost forever to the redirection of a particular pathway. He can feel the subtle narrowing of the universe at this change and thinks he’ll have to find a way to counteract it, before she speaks.

“Doctor,” she says, voice like midnight, and the gallery falls silent as she looks at him. He’d been leaning against a wall, trying to stay out of her way today. She’d pulled him aside weeks ago and backed him into corners he couldn’t escape from. Her eyes had glittered as his hearts sped up, and her smile had turned wolfish when he’d managed to extricate himself from her embrace.

Later, when he’d found the golden apple in his pocket, he’d thrown it hard against the stone wall opposite and spent that night plotting a million doomed escapes.

He walks through the throngs of supplicants, some of them shrinking back from him as he passes. They know what he used to be, and some of them remember what he did when he was. He isn’t that anymore; well, he’s still Gallifreyan, and still holds a universe of knowledge in his head, but he can’t call himself a Lord of Time when she’s in the room.

“Rose,” he says by way of greeting, and tries not to stumble over using her name. She still calls him Doctor, but she’s the only one who does. He tries not to call her Rose.

She doesn’t answer, but motions him to stand beside her and spends the rest of this audience with him standing behind and to her left. Every time she changes something, the ache in his head ratchets up another notch, and by the end, it’s all he can do to put one foot in front of the other to follow her out.

It hurts to look at her for long; her timeline fixed and unending, like a brilliant beacon of starlight in an empty sky. She twirls a lock of her hair and he feels a corner of the universe snuff out as another lights up with renewed purpose. He stumbles when she scrunches her nose, and loses his battle against the ache pulsing at his temples. He has a dizzying vision of her golden eyes swirling with undiluted huon energy before the floor rushes up to meet him.

He wakes, groggy and disoriented. The sheets beneath him are the softest cotton, made evident by the outrageously high thread count beneath his questing fingertips. He rolls over, and his brain stutters to a stilted stop before rebooting with a ferocity that makes his head swim. She’s next to him, sprawled on her stomach in uncaring slumber. Her skin is burnished gold by the rising of the binary suns Poosh orbits, and quite a lot of skin there is. The sheet has fallen off her as she slept, leaving her exposed from the waist.

For a moment, all he can think of is how easy it would be to end it now, to take his pillow and press it over her face and smother the life out of this creature that has taken over Rose’s form. Just as quickly, the moment passes and his stomach rolls and pitches, bile burning the back of his throat. He shudders against the prickle of the cold sweat that bathes him, and she stirs, turning her head and blinking slowly at him. Golden eyes stare out at him from beneath golden fringe, and her smile is predatory.

“Good morning,” she says, and leans up on her forearms. She watches him. He holds himself still under her scrutiny and manages not to flinch as she sweeps a hand through his hair. She skims her hand down his back, and he struggles against the desire to shrink away from her touch. She doesn’t push any further and slips out of bed.

He watches her walk across the room, pull on her robe, and leave. As the door clicks shut behind her, he lets out a breath he didn’t realise he’d been holding before scrambling out of bed himself. He doesn’t find his clothes, and he spares a brief thought wondering where they’ve gotten to, before shimmying into a pair of pants that have been left, clearly with him in mind. He tugs the long-sleeved shirt over his head and sticks his feet into a pair of soft-soled shoes before making a break for his own quarters.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

For a while, they settle into somewhat of a routine. He attends the audiences and stands among her devotees until she summons him to stand behind her. She doesn’t corner him, or press him for more than he’s willing and, he notes, she doesn’t resolve as many conflicts by removing entire timelines. She leaves him to his own devices, ignores his continued efforts to help people in the path of oncoming destruction get out of the way of it, and he settles into a state of gentle panic.

They go on this way for some time before everything changes. She catches him unawares in an empty corridor, her footsteps silent on the cold stone floor. He should’ve known better, shouldn’t have let himself get complacent in this captivity. That’s what he is after all, he thinks as she licks her lips and backs him up against the wall, pinning him with a raised eyebrow.

She’s his captor, has been since Rose screamed and cried and begged; anything to stop the fire of Time in her veins. He doesn’t think about the way her body arched, taut as a bowstring beneath his hands, or about the last time he really saw Rose, brown eyes pained as she smiled, his name a caress on her lips. He doesn’t think about the warmth pouring from her now, or the way she moulds to his body, all he can think about is how this is not the way he wanted this as she kisses the breath from his lungs.

He finds his hands plunged into her hair, and she all but growls when he rocks helplessly against her. She kisses like she’s starved, devouring him entirely. She bites and nibbles and takes advantage when he gasps as she un-tucks his shirt and splays bare hands on his skin. She’s divested him of his jacket and most of the buttons on his shirt before he comes back to himself, and he pushes her off him, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

She’s still, watching him carefully. If he didn’t know better, he thinks, as he struggles to get himself under control, he’d think there is still a part of her that’s really Rose, second-guessing what she’s just done. She reaches for his hand, and he’s powerless. He can’t stop her; a flick of her wrist would erase him from existence. She pulls him along behind her and he follows, dimly aware that the outcome of this encounter has never been in his control.

She leads him to her room, and the big bed with the soft sheets conjures up old fantasies of taking Rose in a bed like this, her creamy skin on display against dark satin and her blonde hair spilling over her shoulders while she moves above him. The fantasies are knocked out his head when she pushes him down, stripping his shirt from his shoulders as she does.

As if from afar, he watches himself on the bed beneath her. She’s vicious; teeth and tongue and fingernails in chorus as she takes him apart. He comes on a shout as she swallows him down. Happily for her, Time Lords do not require human refractory periods and she has him hard again in a flash, her mouth like a firebrand where she sucks bruises into his skin.

The night goes hazy then, around the time she sinks over him and settles herself against him. There are flashes of clarity; the gasping way she moans as he rocks up into her, the way her nails prick and tug against his skin, the flash of gold in her eyes when she comes, shuddering against him.

In the morning, he wakes alone.

Beside him, on the pillow, is a golden apple.

He keeps this one.

For remembrance.

~*~*~*~*~*~

There are more audiences, and he stands still as a statue behind her while she decimates star systems and ends futures before they were even someone’s present. He suffers through the headaches and the time-sickness as timelines bend and snap and coil around him. He is careful not to let her catch him alone again, and if it is unavoidable, he learns how to close himself off inside his head. His clothes hang off a body he no longer trusts.

It all comes to a head when a solar wind slams into the moon, sending shockwaves rolling through the surface. The castle shakes, plaster and mortar raining down around him. He watches her fist close as her eyes brim with fire and she snarls, feral and wild. The castle stops shaking, the glass in the windows halted mid-shatter and everyone but her and him held silent and still in her grip.

“Doctor,” she says, and he flinches. She tuts, moving toward him. He blinks and she’s there in his face, eyes burning, and he can’t look away, caught in the mesmeric pull of the swirl of the vortex in her irises. One hand still closed in a fist, she lifts the other to touch his face, and he swallows hard. Her hand curves around his jaw, the pressure firm and unyielding. The corners of her mouth turn up in what might be called a smile on a lesser being, and she releases her closed fist as she pulls him down for a kiss.

The cacophony of noise as the castle falls apart around them is drowned out by the rush of his blood as she kisses him. She kisses all at once tender and demanding, her mouth moving over his. He can feel his body responding to the wet warmth of her mouth, and he tamps down viciously on the hormones that are starting to heat up as the scent of her hair clouds his nose. She pulls away, tugging on his bottom lip as she goes, and when she releases him they are standing sheltered in a bubble of time.

He looks out around them, and is staggered. The entire castle has come down in the earthquake. Beams and arches, stone and glass litter the ground around them. He tries not to look too closely, because the hall was full of petitioners when she let go of her fist, but he can’t help noticing the bright, wet evidence of the cost of this wreckage.

“They’re nothing,” she says, waving her hand dismissively.

“Nothing?!” He retorts, shrugging out of her grip, and whirling away from her. He fetches up against the edge of their safety net, and it zings as he brushes against it, an electrical shock shivering through his nervous system. “There were _hundreds_ of people in this room. You let them all die, all of them.”

“To save you.”

“To save me?! Save me from what?” He can hear the way his voice has gone ragged around the edges, but he ploughs on, relentless, “Save me from dying on this godforsaken moon?”

The chill that settles over her features takes all the air out of the bubble and the Doctor chokes. His respiratory bypass kicks in, but not before he’s tugged his tie loose in desperation. He spares half a thought to wonder if she actually needs to breathe. He will need to, the bypass only lasts so long, eventually his body will require actual oxygen, not just the extra he can squeeze out of every cell.

She waits him out, watching impassively as he sinks to the floor. His vision is tunneling, every cell in his body screaming for air, for breath, and if not that, than death. He hasn’t said a word, and neither has she, as he quietly suffocates at her feet. It’s only when he’s at the brink, right before everything goes black, that she relents. Air rushes back into the bubble, and he gasps it in, coughing as his lungs fill and fill.

“To save you,” she repeats, “the same way that I could kill you. As easily as breathing.”

“Please,” he says, and her gaze cuts toward him. His mouth runs away with what’s left of his dignity. He’s not sure what he’s asking for, but he’s sure that she’ll know. His Rose always did know, most often better than he. He’s aware somewhere that he’s rambling, but he can’t be bothered to shut up.

He thinks, oddly, that she looks very much like Rose at this moment, standing over him with one hand on her hip while she waits for him to finish. Eventually the words dry up, and he looks up at her from his position at her feet.

“Tell me, Doctor,” she says gently, sinking down to his eye-level. He meets her gaze unflinchingly, for the first time since this whole disaster began.

“Please,” he repeats, and she reaches out. He leans into her touch, eyes closing;  “Please Rose.”

“Oh Doctor,” she croons, and he can hear her moving. When he opens his eyes, Rose is kneeling before him, her brown eyes filled with tears. He’s still hazy from oxygen-deprivation, so he thinks nothing of the way the air seems to shimmer around her.

“Rose,” he says, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t save you.” The lump in his throat threatens to choke him entirely, and he swallows, hard. She smooths the hair away from his face, murmuring soft soothing words as she draws him down into her lap.

“It’s alright, I know you tried. Don’t worry about me, yeah?” He looks up at her to see the tongue-touched grin he loves and can feel his own lips tugging up into a smile to match hers. “I forgive you,” she says, and he grips her hand in his, feeling the flutter of the pulse in her wrist.

Something about the beat of her heart sets him on edge, “Rose?” He asks and she gently tugs her hand from his. “Rose?” He asks again, lifting up from her lap to look at her. When he does, it’s not Rose that’s staring back at him; all of the warmth is gone from her gaze.

“No,” he says, “give her back. Give her back!” His voice rises to a hysterical edge as her eyes light gold from within. He can’t hear himself over the rush of static in his brain, and he can’t take his eyes off hers. He can feel the drag of the universe like a hook through his navel. He grips her hands in his, “give her back to me, _please_ ,” he pleads, “I’ll do anything, _anything_ , please.” He can hear himself begging, offering her things he knows he cannot possibly give, but he can’t stop.

“She was never here, you fool.” Her voice is glacially cold. She shakes off his grip and stands, leaving him in a heap at her feet. There’s a tug inside his head, and she slams into him, a hurricane hitting a thatched hut and blowing it to shambles. He scrambles for the disjointed pieces of himself, hanging onto them while she rifles through his head leaving everything in a mess behind her.

She leaves as quickly as she’s come, and he feels hollowed out and shredded. He can’t seem to make his limbs coordinate to stand, and his head feels like it’s been scooped out and dumped on the floor. She looks down at him, nothing benevolent in her gaze. He has a brief impression of a supernova before he is blinded and everything turns to nothing.

 


End file.
